Question for Readers: Culture Shock
After several weeks of preparing for the arrival of son Anthony and daughter-in-law Pat from Thailand, the newlyweds arrived a few days ago. Anthony has been gone for a couple years and says he has minor culture shock on returning to the US, but I am still trying to grasp the strangeness of all this to Pat, who has never traveled beyond Bangkok and environs and has only rudimentary English skills.
Picking them up at the airport on a fairly mild and partly cloudy Seattle day, Pat stood near the car shivering before we realized she would appreciate sitting in the car with the heater on while we loaded the luggage. I don’t think she had ever experienced air temperatures in the low 60s. I remember son Jon telling about the excitement of his WSU roommate from Hawaii at being able to see his breath on a cool autumn day. When Pat is more rested, we will drive her into the mountains to find snow.
We knew Pat would have her own preferences and needs in food, so we did not stock up on anything beforehand. We took her to an Asian supermarket where she was able to find many food items familiar to her. We also visited a Safeway and QFC to show her what Americans eat. One item that she found delightfully humorous was the bags of peeled baby carrots - she was not sure what they were and wondered where they came from. I thought a bland diet would help Pat’s queasy stomach, but learned that to comfort a Thai stomach one needs spicy food.
I have never traveled to anywhere more exotic than southern Europe. Basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas supposedly offered its own version of culture shock, but it wasn’t that bad for me after growing up with an onerous step-father and spending four years of high school under the Irish Christian Brothers version of fascism.
For this week’s question, what has been the biggest culture shock of your life?
Picking them up at the airport on a fairly mild and partly cloudy Seattle day, Pat stood near the car shivering before we realized she would appreciate sitting in the car with the heater on while we loaded the luggage. I don’t think she had ever experienced air temperatures in the low 60s. I remember son Jon telling about the excitement of his WSU roommate from Hawaii at being able to see his breath on a cool autumn day. When Pat is more rested, we will drive her into the mountains to find snow.
We knew Pat would have her own preferences and needs in food, so we did not stock up on anything beforehand. We took her to an Asian supermarket where she was able to find many food items familiar to her. We also visited a Safeway and QFC to show her what Americans eat. One item that she found delightfully humorous was the bags of peeled baby carrots - she was not sure what they were and wondered where they came from. I thought a bland diet would help Pat’s queasy stomach, but learned that to comfort a Thai stomach one needs spicy food.
I have never traveled to anywhere more exotic than southern Europe. Basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas supposedly offered its own version of culture shock, but it wasn’t that bad for me after growing up with an onerous step-father and spending four years of high school under the Irish Christian Brothers version of fascism.
For this week’s question, what has been the biggest culture shock of your life?
posted by Tom Blake | 2:12 PM
5 Comments:
I've got a few examples having been raised in Seattle until as a young man I left thinking that the entire country had more or less the same beliefs as people in Seattle. Living in Texas, New England, and Arizona showed me how wrong I was.
But the culture shock that I experienced that is most relevant to this blog took place in Paris. Starting in 1971 I made one to four business trips a year to Paris. My destination was usually a large engineering firm. The employees there would shake hands with their colleagues when first seeing them in the morning. In this country, we say "Good Morning" or "Hi", but there they press the flesh. At first I found this custom strange, but, after a while,I came to like it. It seemed very civilized and slightly intimate.
Once I was introduced to an employee who was, at the time, my counterpart in France. I extended my hand in formal greeting, but he turned away. In the days that followed he refused to shake my hand on first meeting. But I persisted in attempting to shake his hand.
I knew by then what the problem was, because his fellow workers clued me in. He was protesting the American war in Vietnam by not shaking the hand of any American!
I was outraged by this, and that's why I persisted in attempting to shake his hand. After some introspection, I traced my outrage to two factors:
1. Patriotism or jingoism depending on your point of view. I resented a foreigner's passing judgement on the actions of my country. Of course I knew I was the foreigner, but outrage is not rational.
2. I had actively protested our involvement in Vietnam. I had done this by demonstrating and by financial contributions to anti-war groups. I felt that he was lazy and not fair because he had not bothered to find out what my own personal convictions were. But he was a protester and protests cannot by subtle.
We worked together until just before the US essentially surrendered in 1974. The political issue did not interfere with our engineering work. I never saw him after the US pull-out so we never had closure on this issue.
John from Phoenix
My first time in a non-English speaking country was in 1969. Arriving in Amsterdam with the Europe on $5 a Day book [that was actually a somewhat realistic figure back then], I rushed to a recommended bed and breakfast near a canal. The door was open and I could hear a vacuum running upstairs. I did not see a doorbell or knocker, so waited for the vacuum to stop and then yelled a hello up the stairs. A man's voice responded something I could not decipher and I then asked., "Do you speak English?" I did understand the reponse - "No" - and that is when the culture shock zapped me.
There I was, standing with suitcases in hand on the doorstep of a Dutchman in Amsterdam whose housework I had just interrupted in English, and I suddenly realized I had no right to presume he would be able to speak English just because I did not speak Dutch - and I was in his country and bothering him. Fortunately, the man came down and was able to communicate enough in English for the room arrangements to be made. Ever since that experience, whenever I encounter a foreigner in the US who only speaks a few words of English, I have understood how hard it is to function in a land where you are not conversant in the language, and I remind myself they are as conversant in their own language as I am in English and they are better in English than I was in Dutch.
I think my first real experience with culture shock was when I was leaving London to fly on to Tel Aviv.
Arriving at the El Al check in line at Heathrow, we were greeted by armed guards carrying assault rifles and guarding our holding area. My friend and I were then separated by El Al’s staff and questioned and interrogated about our intentions, history, reasons for going to Israel. It was intense.
Then, the first few days in Israel it took some time to get used to random checkpoints, armed soldiers everywhere and the general state of ultra-heightened security. It was like nothing I had seen before.
Couple that with the Israeli people’s notoriously gruff mannerism, and it made for a good case of culture shock.
Of course this was in the days before September 11, and now, sadly, my own country sounds very similar.
It has been a long-time since I have really felt culture shock. I guess culture shock has just become reality for me – I constantly expect everything to be different.
Having not lived in the US on a regular basis since before September 11, though, I still get a good shock upon visiting at seeing the current state of things.
Chris in Bangkok
I'm not sure I can recall my greatest moment of culture shock--perhaps it was too great and I've simply blocked it out...But I had plenty of memorable ones in Thailand and Hungary.
Thailand: On our first night in Bangkok, we attended a local bar. The custom there, apparently, is for a group of people to drink beer together by slurping it from the same pitcher (a plastic, ice-filled pitcher)...through straws!
Hungary: when we received our bill at the first place we ate in Budapest, it seemed we'd been overcharged for the drinks. We later learned that the prices on menus there are standardly per liter (or whatever the relevant unit is), with no indication as to how many units you're purchasing (typically two or three). It was interesting to see how the staff, which spoke no English, responded. Its impatience and hostility seemed distinctly different, somehow, from the impatience and hostility one might expect some Americans to show foreigners in a similar situation. My sense (based on many other experiences as well) was that certain commerical skills which we take for granted had not yet fully taken hold there yet...(This was around '96.)
Seth in Vermont
I don't know that I'd call it culture shock exactly, but a moment that has always stuck with me: while living in Scotland I shared a flat with another student from Poland. One day she and I were comparing notes on our early education, and I told her about a particularly frustrating day I had had in gym class, where we weren't allowed to return to the locker room until we made a basket from the basketball free-point line. I've always been terrible at basketball and ended up missing my next class while my irate gym teacher made me shoot and shoot again. "I know something about this," Izabella replied, "growing up in Communist Poland, our gym exercises were often military training activities. One day we all had to sit in a ditch and throw plastic grenades into a basket 20M away. I sat outside crying, missing my classes, because I could not get the grenade to hit the target." The contrast between our two stories definately gave me pause.
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